Two Antiviruses Running Resident

Hi, excuse me if this is a studid question. I have always followed the advice given in Wilders and other forums that it is not a good thing to run two antivirus programs as resident at one time. Possible conflict between the two being the reason. I have however noticed that there are at least 3 popular AV programs that do run more than one AV resident at one time - Extendia AVK (RAV and KAV), GDATA AVK (Bitdefender and KAV) and F-Secure (KAV, Orion and F-Prot). My question is this, can some AV's be run with others, both as resident or am I missing something here. I have licenses for both KAV and Bitdefender and would quite like to run them both as resident. What do you think?

 

Etrust also has two engines, and is the only AV of this type I am familar with. As I recall, the user specifies which engine is employed for on-access scanning - so in this case I don't believe there are actually two scanners running simultaneously.

I am certain that the other multi-engine AV's are designed to efficiently employ resources in a way that we users cannot - so running a two-engine AV is not the same as running KAV and Bitdefender simultaneously. In the latter case, I am confident that the conflict risks and resource usage of running these AV's together far outweigh the potential benefit (if there is any).

Why don't you run one resident and run the other as a backup on-demand scanner and as a scheduled (routine) system scanner?

 

Running two resident AV's is not a good idea. This is because it can cause a lot of problems when accessing files, because each AV scanner will want to be the first to access the file you could find the system hang indefinitely because of a "tug-of-war" between the AV's trying to get in there first.

 

As optigrap mentioned,dual engine antiviruses are not the same as two resident antivirus programs running at the same time.
Dual engine AVs are programmed to work together without conflicts if the malware is detected by both of them it selects one or another engine to clean it. If the product is seperate,then both would detect it,but only one would be able to handle it (to delete or quarantine it).

 

Thanks for the replies and advice, looks like I'll be sticking with what i've got for now.
Cheers
Steve

 

Hi StevieV.

Nothing is a "stupid question" in here mate!
There may be some silly/stupid statements from time to time, but questions are the gateway to learning.

Personally I would run KAV as the *primary* resident with RTM enabled, and use Bitdefender as the 'On Demand Back-up Scanner'.

In other words, just have KAV running, and if you need to check something, do it with KAV rightclick option first, then Bitdefender to double check.

Definitely, IMO, I would not run both resident for above reasons by other posters.

I am running KAV myself, but when dl stuff, I check with:
KAV
TDS3
WormGuard

To be really sure, you may even run AdAware/SpybotS&D over it in case of general Malware.

Cheers, TAS